


Sketches of You

by gentliam (OnceStarted)



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, This is disgustingly sweet, but it had to be done, sugar sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 09:32:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4430216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnceStarted/pseuds/gentliam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short reaction to Liam’s tweet about how he hasn’t drawn anything since he was twelve. Which in my honest opinion is utter LIES.<br/>Or the one in which, Liam is tired but not tired enough to sleep and Zayn has magic hands that produce master pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sketches of You

**Author's Note:**

> Caution if you have an aversion to sugar and everything disgustingly sweet avoid this.
> 
> This is a work of fiction and as far as I know, at the time of writing, holds no ounce of truth.
> 
> Also this was written on a 2 am sugar high and thus I apologise for any errors, grammatical or spelling. My eyes are the only ones who scoured this piece for mistakes and I am soley to blame. 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr [here](http://gentliam.tumblr.com/)

The thing about coming off stage is, that although they were physically exhausted, the emotional high and buzz that coursed through the boys wasn’t really conducive to sleep. When they had first started touring that energy was poured out into late night impromptu dance party’s in hotel rooms, and later into clubs and bars. Now as they had settled and, for a lack of a better word, matured, they had created their own routines that suited their individual needs to decompress. With the right motivation Niall and Louis could still be convinced to head out to some night spot in the country they were currently in. However, these days, they mostly liked to spend their down time bothering Harry or rallying everyone into a competitive game of fifa on the xbox that would appear like magic in Niall's room. Harry is usually happy doing whatever Louis is doing unless he is feeling a little melancholy and then he’s happy to write, and write until the night weighs too heavy on his eyelids.

Much like the other lads, these days Liam likes a softer approach to dispersing his after concert energy. There was a time when he’d go out with Lou and dance the night away with strangers. Then there was the period, which he isn’t too proud of, where he would head to the gym until he couldn’t think straight and it was only one more rep then bed. Now, he likes to put on some music maybe sit with Harry and write for a bit, or throw on his headphones and fiddle with the new software Julian put on his computer. His favourite nights, though, are when they are all feeling that slight pull of nostalgia and they converge, usually without consciously deciding on who’s room, and talk late into the night about anything and everything.

And Zayn, well Zayn likes to draw. He’ll seek out either Harry or Liam, as they are often the quietest coming down off a show and he’ll crowd himself into the smallest space avaliable, rest his sketch pad on his lap, and let go, the only sound the scratching of lead against paper. He’s much like Harry when he gets into the swing of things. Getting so wrapped up in his art that he has an inane ability to just block everyone and everything out. Liam wishes that the amount of time spent with the both of them would have allowed this ability to have rubbed off on him. But alas, without the help of headphones he’s always been the one that gets distracted by the smallest of sounds or flicker of movement. Zayn teases him, insisting that it’s his inherent paternal instincts, the ‘daddy direction’ he hadn’t been able to shake since they formed. Liam retorts by suggesting if he hadn’t stepped up and taken on that responsibility they wouldn’t be sitting in a hotel room in some foreign country enjoying the benefits of their fame. Zayn's only retort would be to stick out his tongue and call Liam a 'spoil sport'. “Case and point, right there Malik.”

  
After a show in the US Liam is finding it hard to release the tension built by the one of the most insane concerts they've had. It is one of the rare occasions that they are on a tour bus again, and it has been long enough that it takes them a bit of time to fit their routines into the smaller spaces that once seemed so homely. So Niall, Louis and Harry are crowded into the back where the console is and Liam can hear Lou back seat gaming something fierce. It won’t be long until Harry will just pass the controller to him and let him thrash Niall in the way he is trying to coach Harry too. The end credits to the movies Liam had been watching are scrolling into nothingness and he stretches his legs out, toes touching the end of his bunk. He’s still not tired like he knows he should be and batman returns usually puts him to sleep. But he is restless in a way that he can’t seem to sedate.

  
He pulls back the curtain and sticks his head out, he can make out three pairs of feet in the back of the bus, and he wouldn’t mind joining them. Although, while he isn’t tired, he probably isn’t awake enough to be any good at fifa so he turns his head to the front of the bus. He can’t see a thing, but he knows that the light coming from under the door means that Zayn must be out there. Twisting so that he can slide out of the bunk he lands on the floor of the bus with a soft thud. Fiddling with the latch he manages to slide the door away enough to slip into kitchenette without disturbing Zayn.

  
He’s seated in the booth, back against the cushions feet propped up on the window sill. There are an assortment of pens and pencils scattered across the table top and a black felt tip marker tucked behind his ear. Liam watches him silently for a moment not wanting his presence to disturb Zayn’s concentration, his tongue slips out for a second wetting his bottom lip as he pushes his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose with his spare hand. He sketch pad is resting on his knees as his hand blurs across the page until with what Harry had dubbed his ‘Liam Senses’, or just Zayn’s innate ability to pick out who was watching him without them have to talk or make eye contact, he looks up, his mouth pulling up at one corner into a smile.

  
“I thought you were sleeping?” Liam shuffles over to the end of the booth sliding in as Zayn pulls his legs off the window sill and tucks them back underneath himself.

“Nah, was watching a movie, but I guess I’d hoped it would put me to sleep, so you are sort of right.” He leans over Zayn’s shoulder to take a peek at what he is drawing. It seems to be some sort of landscape and Liam wonders if it was an actual place, or a figment of Zayn’s seemingly endless imagination.

“They boys aren’t being too loud are they? You know you have every right to tell them to shut up.” Liam nods as he lays his head against Zayn’s shoulder.

“I know, they weren’t though, and I’m used to the noise.” Zayn turns is head a fraction smiling down at Liam.

“You wanna hang here still you get sleepy? We can talk or I can grab the cards out of my bunk?” Liam shook his head nuzzling into Zayn’s neck.

“Nah, if I’m not bothering you I think I just want to watch you draw for a bit.” Liam hesitates a little, it’s not like this isn’t something that’s happened before. Liam getting distracted by the way Zayn looks when he draws, completely involved in the way his pencil skims across the paper. However most of the time Liam is actively trying to do something of his own and he just ends up staring at Zayn. This would probably be the first time he is admittedly purposefully going to watch Zayn draw and he’s not sure how the other boy is going to react.

Zayn raises an eyebrow and shakes his head just enough that his chins taps softly against Liam’s head. “I don’t mind, s’long as you don’t move too much.” Liam lets out a small huff of breath as he nods, blinking slowly as Zayn resumes drawing.

Liam is transfixed by Zayn’s hand, the way it glides over his pad, effortlessly producing lines that slowly form shapes. Liam had always wondered how Zayn could do this without any image for reference but what he had stored in his head. He conveys this query in a mumbled voice, mostly into Zayn’s neck. It causes Zayn to pause, lifting his pencil for the briefest of moments considering his answer.

“I guess I don’t really think about, I have a general idea about what I want to draw, but if I concentrate too hard on what I want it to look like, I just get frustrated. So it’s better to just let it happen.” His words are accentuated by strokes against the paper. Mountains appear across the horizon and Liam thinks that he’d very much like to visit the places Zayn keeps stored in his head. Liam stays as still as he can as he watches the image slowly develop before his eyes. The mountains get capped with snow and the foreground fills with trees. Zayn takes a small clump of what looks like chewing gum, running it along the branches of the tree he is currently working on. It erases some of the lead pencil creating shadows and dimension where it was once flat.

“How do you know where to shade and where to…” Liam can’t quite remember what Zayn had called it and with his sleep fogged brain he doesn’t quiet have the energy to go searching for it.

“Highlight? I guess it’s a part of that general idea, you need to know where your light source is coming from. Or even if you need light. Some of the stuff I do I leave flat because it looks better when it doesn’t look too realistic. This on the other hand I want to look real, so I need to add dimension so it doesn’t look like I drew it.” Liam nods, as Zayn places the squishy eraser back on the table next to the rest of his drawing utensils. He does remember some of this stuff, there are snippets of memories of Ms Honeychurch describing light sources and how to pull focus on different elements in a drawing by highlighting or adding shadows. If Liam thinks about it, he was probably around 12 when he last did a serious drawing that wasn’t a rude doodle alongside his notes. That was before deciding that art probably wasn’t his best creative calling. Deciding to channel into signing instead.

“It’s coming back to me a bit, who’d have thought I’d be discussing the importance of shadows and dimensions in my twenties. My art teacher’d be so proud.” Zayn’s hand stilled hovering over the trunk he’d been adding bark detail too.

“You used to draw?” Liam lifted his head so he could face Zayn, his tone catching him off guard. His expression was one of shocked with delight slowly creeping in.

“Yeah, I guess, I don’t think I was very good, but I remember my art teacher being pretty disappointed when I dropped art to take up music. There are a few sketch books my mum kept from the old house. But I’m nowhere near as good as you, haven’t really done anything since I was, what 12, maybe?” Zayn’s mouth turned into a full blown grin. If Liam had known sharing this seemingly trivial fact about himself would cause Zayn this much joy, he’d have divulged it long ago. Zayn flipped the page he was working on over and yanked another out of his book. Laying it on the table in front of Liam he picked up a different pencil and broke off a piece of his eraser, placing the items alongside the piece of paper. He looked at Liam expectantly as he raised an eyebrow.

  
“You want me to draw something? Did you not hear me, I haven’t seriously picked up a pencil since I was 12 Zayn, it’s going to be crap.” Zayn shakes his head and places the mechanical pencil in Liam’s hand.

“Nothing you could produce would be crap. Just let go like I said, have fun.” Liam gives him a quizzical look, but Zayn just gives him an encouraging nod and returns to his own work.

He looked down at the blank piece of paper in front of him and it seemed to overwhelm him, it's vast emptiness taunting him. He was so out of practice. Sure he had quite a few sketches of batman tucked into folders in boxes at home but he always had a reference image. He couldn’t pull master pieces out of his head like Zayn could, he’d have to find something he could draw. He glanced around the bus but nothing seemed to jump out at him. He didn’t want to draw the toaster or the packet of gummy bears Harry had left open on the counter by the sink. He tapped the pencil against the table and glanced back over at Zayn. He was completely lost in his own work again, tongue slipping in and out of his mouth. Which was, obscene, to say the least, so Liam shifted his gaze, drifting down to his hands. Zayn had such nice hands, his long fingers splayed out over his sketch pad keeping it steady as his right scurried about forming shapes and shadows. The bones pulling tight against his skin as he gripped the page with the pads of his fingers. Liam didn’t really know where to start, but he tried to keep what Zayn had said to him in the forefront of his mind, ‘let go, have fun’. So Liam stops thinking about it and just let’s his own hand make movements against the paper.

  
So that’s how Louis find them tucked against each other Zayn hunched over the sketch pad in his lap and Liam all but lying on the table hand flying across his own piece of paper. He watches as Liam takes periodic glances over at Zayn. And at first he thinks it’s because Liam is seeking some sort of approval, because who knew that Liam drew, not Louis that’s for sure. But as he leans against the door frame he realises that he is concentrating on Zayn’s hand and specifically the tattoo that creeps across the skin on the back of his left hand.

  
They are so caught up in their own little world that Louis starts to feel like his encroaching on a ‘moment’ and he just as quietly slips out of the room. Deciding that they didn’t really need to know that they rest of the lads were headed to bed and that they’d see them in the morning.

  
Liam glances once more between the drawing in front of him and Zayn’s hand. Sure it’s probably slightly skewed because of the angle he’d be working from, it definitely wasn’t anatomically correct, and no matter how many times he’d tried Zayn’s pinkie nail just didn’t look quite right. But ultimately he was kind of proud of how it hand turned out. Putting his pencil down, he grasps the paper with both hands and stands it up in front of himself, taking it in as a whole. Liam thinks that Ms Honeychurch might actually be pretty proud of him, considering time had passed and how out of practice he was.

  
A sharp intake of breath startles him from his self-gloating. Zayn had looked up from his own drawing which, from what Liam could see looked like it was almost done, and was staring at the image in front of Liam.

“Jesus Liam. Is that? That’s me, that’s my hand.” Zayn sounded breathless and Liam shrugged unsure of how to respond to Zayn’s reaction.

“Ah, yeah, yeah it is. Sorry I’m not, I’m not like you. I need something to look at. And well your hands are nice. And well available to look at. So yeah, I drew your hand. Is that okay? Do you like it?” Zayn’s hand drifts moving to hover over its likeness, his silence unnerving as he takes in Liam’s drawing. The same hand reflected on the paper find a place atop Liam’s shoulder, pulling his attention so that Liam turns to face Zayn.

“It’s really good, really good Liam.” And his shudders under Zayn’s heavy gaze, he likes the way he draws out his name and a slow blush creeps up under his skin. Liam drops his gaze, the intensity of Zayn’s eyes too much.

“I’m glad you like it, you can have it if you want.” Liam mumbles into his own lap looking down at the lead version of the hand nestled against his shoulder.

“I’d like that. I’d also really like if you drew with me again. Maybe after the next show. We can pick you up some stuff tomorrow, so you don’t have to share mine.” Liam lifts his head and grins at Zayn, his features turned soft, he shifts so Liam can once again lay his head in the crook of Zayn’s neck.

“I think I’d like that. I think I’d like that a lot.”


End file.
